The beginning of the quarter was the start of my first college-writing experience. My practices and habits of researching and writing have stayed relatively the same throughout my writing experience because even in high school my main focus when I wrote any paper was primarily research, argumentative, or persuasive writing. However I believe that my organizing when writing has evolved through the use of the annotated bibliographies, as I never wrote summaries and I simply used to write down quotes with no explanations when noting what I wanted to include from particular websites. The WR39 series for 39C is the only writing class I have taken and it has not really influenced my writing choices in my other writing assignments simply because I am taking STEM based classes and no humanities courses. However I believe that my writing for other classes, particularly those I took in high school before, have influenced my writing process. I used to be in MUN, which formatted historical context, establishing a problem, and noting solutions that would be useful in a real world context. My experience in writing research papers for this class in MUN was extremely similar for the CP and AP projects and I felt comfortable and confident in writing those papers because of my previous knowledge of the style of writing necessary for them. Even in lab reports for my classes at UCI, I feel as if I have used the new writing style I have adopted in an organizational way within my writing for WR39C. It is extremely formulaic for the lab, and I have adopted within my writing process by outlining the experiment in detail while including the multimodal aspects that were previously a part of my AP writing. The multimodal aspect is probably what I took from this class to grow the most, as it greatly enhanced what I integrated into my lab reports, making my evidence stronger and clearer when reading through.

Excerpt from my recent lab report:

This course’s theme of education shaped my writing in the way that I had to think of solutions and my purpose for my topic from the perspective of how it truly affects students, and how academia is a major influence in a person’s life no matter the context of the problem. It has invited me to think differently about the community I am living in, particularly that the community has served more to perpetuate the issue that I have taken a stance on for far too long and has only recently begun to present aid due to the current situation of social issues surrounding the background of my topic. I have also thought differently of my role as a student after seeing what other students have contributed to the issue through my research. I realized that I, as an individual, have the capability to make a difference within the bounds of the issue within my community, and it has caused me to feel more confident about some of the efforts that I have been making to make small changes over time as I have gone through my educational journey.

My strategies for starting an essay have not greatly changed over time as my methods work sufficiently with what I was assigned for in this class. I always gather my sources, pick a few quotes that I believe support my basic thesis, and then formulate explanations based on those quotes I have chosen. Research figures into this process very easily as it is my starting point for my essays. I see myself capable of engaging with other perspectives through the entirety because my essay is based on the “other perspective” of an outdated stereotype and how it is incorrect and harmful. I have integrated various sources, scholarly articles, news reports, interviews, and research papers, all of which have been majorly supportive of my point of view. I have been able to become more skillful by presenting my evidence in an organized manner based on importance and emphasizing flow through connection between each of my evidential paragraphs that connect directly to supporting my thesis.

When I first started this course, persuasive writing to me meant that I was writing for the purpose of convincing a reader of my paper that what I say is true. However, now I believe persuasive writing is meant to show a reader a different point of view to give a new perspective or idea on a particular topic. I have learned to write more persuasively with my new viewpoint on what persuasive writing is in mind, as now I write to show a different perspective rather than formulating my explanations with the purpose of sounding convincing. I have made more convincing claims by making use of others’ personal experiences, as I generally tend to lean more towards favoring the use of statistics to prove my explanations. I used both these types of sources for experiences and statistical evidence to provide concrete details as well as real life examples of people being affected by the issue I have presented, which creates a variety of evidence being used to more strongly support my thesis. As this was the first time I used multimodal communication within my paper, I believe it made a difference as I used it for each type of source that I categorized my evidence into. My first graph was used in a statistical manner to give imagery to information that I presented that makes the reader more understanding of the impact of the statistic. My second source was a tweet that emphasized blatant racism from a public figure that I believe would make an impact as it was from a well-known source, emphasizing my point further.

The two images of evidence I used in my multimodal process:

Honestly, I do not truly have a revision process. I have trouble reading back my papers to myself coherently, but through my peer reviews from my classmates and external sources, I often find out simple grammatical mistakes or run on sentences that I can easily fix and organize more cleanly. I also generally add one or two more paragraphs when I revise as I tend to remember a different point of evidence that would support my thesis that I typically forgot about or thought should be its own separate paragraph due to a particular level of importance that I became aware about through furthering my research. I tend to focus on organizing my sentence structures to be less run on or awkwardly worded in style as well as adding entirely new evidence. I see this primarily as a collaborative activity because I struggle analyzing my own writing by myself. Receiving feedback from others is a great help for my writing, and generally I am able to analyze others’ writing far better than my own. I have benefitted from my teacher in one-on-one calls as she has shown me a new perspective on some points in my writing that I did believe would make my argument stronger, and hence I included her suggestions in my next drafts.

Notes I took during our Zoom meeting:

My peers in workshops helped me more with my grammatical style and sentence organization and I generally always take their suggestions automatically, as I believe I respond to criticism well. Unless I include a suggestion further in my paper, I will always be willing to change according to my peer edits as I do not truly trust myself editing my own writing. My relationship with peer review became more confident, and I was willing to let others see my work more easily. Before, I had never really peer reviewed with strangers, only with other friends that I was close to, and after WR39C, I am now more confident in having others view and evaluate my work even if I do not know them. For example, one peer review workshop I received criticism that I should include real experiences by a peer as well as my teacher, so I took the sign and realized that I only had statistical evidence in my paper because I treated it solely as a research paper, and so I gathered new sources and evidence related to the criticism and added it into my next drafts.

Going through this class, I appreciate the opportunity that I was given to explore my own culture in a different light while also being allowed to grow as a writer. Despite not having writing be a process that is generally consistent within my academic career, I do believe that my processes that I have newly acquired from this class will serve me greatly as I continue through higher education and push me forward through all my other classroom environments